Preparing For Life, And Difficult Choices, After The April 7 Ruling

A DyeStat Report By Oliver Hinson and Dave Devine

In two weeks, Judge Claudia Wilken will make a ruling on the landmark court case House vs. NCAA. The ruling stands to drastically change college track and field, as well as the lives of those in and around it.

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In the end, it came down to this: four chairs, hastily arranged at the edge of an outdoor track.

Every mile, every interval, every dream. All of it, whittled down to four empty seats at the corner of Virginia Tech’s Johnson-Miller Track Complex.

For Ryan McGinley and Jake Rimmel, sophomores on Virginia Tech’s men’s cross country and track teams, it had been an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. The NCAA cross country season had concluded the previous weekend; the Virginia Tech men finished 26th behind sophomore George Couttie’s 14th-place effort. 

Neither McGinley nor Rimmel — both preferred walk-ons — had cracked the top seven, but with winter around the corner, each was looking forward to indoor track as a chance to cement their place on one of the top middle-distance squads in the nation.

That was before the text messages arrived.

McGinley was walking home from class when he received a text from Ben Thomas, Virginia Tech’s director of cross country and track and field. Only a sentence or two, the note was unexpected, brief and somewhat cryptic

Could McGinley meet at the track at 4 p.m.?

Rimmel, preparing for his easy afternoon run, received a similar message.

“I just got this gut feeling — this isn't right.”

Rimmel and McGinley realized they had gotten the same text, and with a few hours until the meeting, they both called their parents, suspecting from the tone of Thomas’ messages that bad news was imminent.

“Just the slowest two hours of my life,” McGinley says, “waiting for that meeting to happen.”

They arrived separately to the track, noticing two other teammates who had also been summoned to the facility.

“I remember walking onto the track that day,” Rimmel says, “and I saw Ryan and the two other guys, and I just wanted to cry…I knew this was the beginning of the end. It wasn't a great situation.”

Thomas pulled four chairs to an opening alongside the track, asked the four athletes to have a seat, and then brought a fifth for himself.

“You could tell,” Rimmel says, “he was kind of dreading this conversation, too.”

The coach began by explaining imminent changes to NCAA roster limits, pressures on athletic departments, especially ones in leagues like the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the difficult choices coaching staffs face when confronted with those realities.  

“He told us,” McGinley says, “that he's coached people at our level at this point in their careers who have gone on to score at ACC championships, potentially even make national meets, but that's not the way things work in the NCAA anymore.”

All four student athletes were released from Virginia Tech’s roster that afternoon.

“He just said,” Rimmel recalls, “he couldn't keep us on any longer.”

 

PORTLAND, OREGON

“This is my roster…”

It’s mid-December, about two weeks and 2,700 miles from that Tuesday afternoon at Virginia Tech, and Rob Conner, the longtime men’s cross country and track and field coach at the University of Portland (photo above courtesy UP), stands up from a couch in his office and walks over to a large whiteboard. He points at a list of names in the upper left of the board, divided into five columns and neatly printed in dry-erase marker. 

"Okay," he says, "these are my guys. This is my roster."

There are 50 names on the board. 

He walks through the divided list, pointing out the top group of 10 or so runners; the next seven up-and-comers; a collection of middle-distance guys who primarily race track events; some walk-ons and students who train with the team, but race infrequently. He notes seniors in their last year, fifth-year graduate transfers in their final season, places where eligibility expires. Showing how he could get to a cross country roster of 17 if it was necessary. 

It's possible. He could do it. 

But he has no interest in trying, and hopes he won't have to.

“I've taken this whole thing as speculative,” Conner says. “We don't know that it's 100% gonna happen. A lot of teams are acting as if it is, however.”

The shift Conner is discussing, the “whole thing” he considers speculative, has the potential to be seismic. 

Recent changes to Division I athletics, like the creation of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments, the transfer portal, and conference realignment, have radically altered how athletic departments throughout the NCAA operate. But if a landmark legal settlement that received preliminary approval in October 2024 is granted final approval on April 7, it will usher in a new era for NCAA athletics, allowing colleges and universities to share, for the first time, revenue with their student-athletes.

House vs. NCAA, as the settlement is known, is an antitrust lawsuit that combines three similar cases that received class-action status: House vs. NCAA, Hubbard vs. NCAA, and Carter vs. NCAA. The lead name refers to a former Arizona State University swimmer named Grant House who sued the NCAA in 2020, claiming that student-athletes who competed prior to the advent of NIL payments were entitled to retroactive compensation.

While the defendants in the case are the NCAA and the “Power 5” conferences — the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Pac-12 (still named, despite the near total dissolution of the conference in 2024) — the implications of the settlement, should it be finalized, will reverberate through conferences and leagues far beyond those in the lawsuit.

The negotiated deal, initially approved by Judge Claudia Wilken of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in October, has three main components: 1) almost $2.8 billion in backpay to former athletes, distributed over a 10-year period; 2) a structure of revenue-sharing allowing schools to share as much as $23 million annually with athletes; and 3) a removal of historic scholarship caps combined with formal roster limits that will permit, but not require, schools to offer scholarships to their entire rosters.

Under current rules, there is no roster size limit for Division I cross country or track and field. Schools can offer a maximum of 12.6 men’s scholarships and 18 women’s scholarships (which can be divided fractionally among multiple athletes). Traditionally, this has meant many programs carry rosters that far exceed the available scholarships, swelled by walk-ons and promising-but-still-developing athletes on small, partial scholarships. 

It’s not uncommon for a D1 cross country team to carry 25-30 distance runners on its roster (or, in Conner’s case at Portland, 50), nearly all of whom contribute to the track roster as well. 

The new roster limits imposed by the House settlement would be 17 for cross country and 45 for track and field, a significant reduction for many teams around the country. Schools outside the Power 5 would not be required to adopt the roster limits, but if a non-Power 5 school opts into revenue-sharing with student athletes (increasingly likely, given competition between schools for recruits), it must also accept the caps on roster size.

Of course, simply because a university can award scholarships up to the allowable roster size, doesn’t mean they will. Or that they would have the financial capacity to do so, particularly for sports that generate little or no revenue for the university, like track and cross country. 

The more likely outcome is that added pressure on athletic department budgets, due to the demands of athlete revenue sharing and fully-funded scholarships for sports like football and basketball, will result in Olympic sports like track and field facing reduced scholarship money, eliminated roster spots and — at some schools — the elimination of the sport entirely.

All of this has sent shockwaves from the highest levels of collegiate track through the locker rooms of high schools around the country.

Which is why, on the same December day that Conner was contemplating that roster on his whiteboard, Sam Seemes was raising alarm bells at the U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association's annual convention in Orlando, Florida.

Seemes, CEO of the USTFCCCA for 20 years, gave the opening remarks at the conference, delivering a stirring message that also served as a clarion call for coaches in attendance.

"Let me be blunt," Seemes said. "Our sports are under siege. Not in some distant future, but right now. The threats are real and immediate: Shrinking opportunities for student-athletes. Vanishing budgets. Disappearing scholarships. Reduced coaching positions. Complete program elimination. Replacement by sports perceived as more valuable."

Calling this an “unprecedented era of collegiate athletics,” Seemes pointed to vanishing student athlete opportunities, diminished budgets, and declining relevance as existential concerns for cross country and track and field at the collegiate level.

"We must save ourselves," he said, authoring a call for collaboration and creativity that was clearly meant to resonate beyond the hall in which he was speaking. “The future of track & field and cross country isn’t written yet, but the window of opportunity is closing.”

As coaches and administrators await Judge Wilken’s final decision on April 7, many schools have already implemented changes on the assumption that the House settlement will be approved. Walk-ons and partial-scholarship athletes are being released from D1 rosters. Recruiting at the high school level has been significantly impacted. College coaches, wary of inviting developmental talent onto rosters expected to contract, are increasingly turning to the transfer portal for proven talent with several years of collegiate experience. 

Back in Portland, Conner is seeing many of those signs himself.

He’s doing his best to adapt to a shifting landscape while adhering to the principles that have made Portland a small-school distance power. Striking a balance between graduate or transfer portal additions and promising high school recruits that require a longer runway. And he’s remaining optimistic that the House settlement impact won’t be quite as dire as many suspect.

“Overall,” he concedes, “I'd say it's a concerning situation, but I'm holding out hope that somehow we're going to still value the student-athlete experience to a level which deems it important and thus, maybe we won't restrict it so much.”

 

BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA

“There was this impending thing looming over us…”

McGinley and Rimmel, the two former Virginia Tech runners, entered the university together in the fall of 2023, full of optimism and ambition. 

Recruited by then-head coach Eric Johannigmeier, they were a pair of walk-ons with similar PRs. Rimmel came from Virginia’s Loudoun Valley High, a school that produced prep running legend Drew Hunter and then won back-to-back Nike Cross National titles in 2017 and 2018. Rimmel ran 1:55 for 800 and 4:13 for 1,600 meters as a prep. McGinley arrived at Virginia Tech from La Salle College High School, a Philadelphia distance power, where he was a 1:55 800 runner and a 4:13 miler.  

Shortly before the start of freshman year, the two recruits learned there would be a change to the coaching staff. Thomas, the former Virginia Tech coach who had spent the previous five years at the University of Oregon developing some of the top middle-distance runners in the nation, was returning to take the helm in Blacksburg.

The news was both thrilling and slightly unsettling for the two newcomers.

“I was really excited,” Rimmel says. “A little nervous, too, because (it’s) someone who wasn't part of my recruitment, so I was a little nervous about that part.”

McGinley, at first, shared his classmate’s enthusiasm.

“When (the news) first came out,” he recalls, “it was exciting. It was like, this guy has coached arguably the best distance group in NCAA history with that 2021(Oregon) team. But then I didn't click as well as I hoped with his training.”

Initially, it appeared there would be a place on the Virginia Tech staff for Johannigmeier, the coach who recruited them, but by the following summer he had been hired by Illinois, and Rimmel and McGinley felt even more uncertain about their status on the team.

Both had raced for the Hokies in the spring of 2024, recording solid if unspectacular marks.  They expected to suit up for races again in the fall. But as news spread last summer about the possibility of roster cuts in anticipation of the House settlement, and Thomas’ own recruits started arriving on campus, McGinley and Rimmel felt increasingly uneasy.

And then came a report that the influential SEC was planning to reduce the roster caps on the men’s side from 17 to 10 in cross country and 45 to 35 in track.

Most observers expected the ACC and other power conferences to follow suit.

“If you just did the simple math,” Rimmel says, “we were over the limit. And not a lot of guys were leaving, so we kind of knew cuts were going to be made. There was this impending thing looming over us, which, to be honest, had me very stressed. It was really a negative on my mental health for a long time.”

By the time that early December meeting rolled around, it was almost a relief to have what Rimmel called the “impending doom” removed from his life.

“At least the Band-aid was ripped off, you know?”

Even though neither runner clicked with Thomas as a coach, they didn’t hold him personally responsible for their release from the team. 

“I have nothing against him,” Rimmel says. “I know it's just business at the end of the day. He still thinks we're talented, and in any normal year we'd still be able to compete at this level.” 

Mostly, Rimmel, blames conference higher-ups and NCAA decision-makers. 

“I just don't think this is very fair for many people.”

On that point, Thomas would almost certainly agree.

The Virginia Tech coach recently joined 17 other Power 5 head coaches— names like Caryl Smith Gilbert (Georgia), Dennis Shaver (LSU), Jerry Schumacher (Oregon), Maurica Powell (Washington) and Vin Lananna (Virgina) — in authoring an urgent, open letter to “The Track and Field Community.” The letter echoes Seemes’ USTFCCCA speech, raising existential concerns about the future of track and field and urging action from those who love the sport. 

Among four key concerns identified: Roster Limits.

“While some programs may thrive,” the letter notes, “others could be forced to make difficult cuts, diminishing opportunities for development and recruiting.” 

After their own experience with those cuts, McGinley and Rimmel joined a third teammate who was released at that trackside meeting for a dinner out, where they discussed their collective futures. Each had come to love Virginia Tech, and struggled to imagine attending college somewhere else. All of their friends were in Blacksburg. They had academic plans there, classes lined up for the spring.

But if they hoped to continue in the sport, it meant transferring somewhere else.

McGinley decided to remain at Virginia Tech, working out on his own while he completes his sophomore courses and explores options with other D1 teams.

Rimmel went home to Purcellville, Va., where he’s attending community college and training on the dirt roads and high school track that initially sparked his love for the sport.

“Me and Jake, we definitely don't feel like we're done with the sport yet,” McGinley says emphatically. “I just really don't feel like I'm satisfied with where I'd be leaving the sport, and I really want to see how good I can be.”

But as the two former Hokies, now in the transfer portal, reach out to coaches around the country, they’re finding the same constraints they experienced at Virginia Tech are an issue everywhere else, too.

“I’ve talked to a handful of schools,” Rimmel says, “but I've mostly gotten the same email saying, ‘We're dealing with roster limits here ourselves, but we wish you the best.’”

McGinley’s experience echoes Rimmel’s.

“Every coach knows that they have to downsize the roster,” he says, “and definitely has more loyalty towards their current athletes. They're not taking on developmental guys.”

According to many athletes and coaches, it’s one of the most damaging aspects of the House settlement roster caps — the elimination of space for the walk-on athlete. The dissipation of opportunities for athletes to develop over the course of a college career.

There will be far fewer hidden gems or diamonds in the rough. Fewer coaches willing to take a flyer on a kid with modest marks and loads of upside. Those kinds of stories will be vanishingly rare in a post-House settlement NCAA.

“They’re just taking away opportunities from people that have worked hard and sacrificed a lot,” McGinley says.  

Which doesn’t mean he or Rimmel have given up.

“I really debated staying on at Tech,” Rimmel concludes, “and just being a normal student because I loved it there so much…but I feel like I couldn't just end there. I had to give it one more try.”

There is comfort, at least, in the knowledge that they are not alone.

 

STARKVILLE, MISSISSIPPI

“They probably won’t take anyone under 16 feet now.”

About a year ago, the Ides of March struck Braxton Sanford.

On March 15, his Mississippi State teammates were in Miami competing in the Hurricane Invitational, their first outdoor meet of the 2024 season. The meet itself was hardly monumental; according to Mississippi State’s athletics website, one athlete set a school record, and six others put themselves in the school’s top-five list for their respective events. 

That wasn’t the only news out of Coral Gables, though. The Bulldogs’ multi-event coach, Gray Horn, suddenly left the team during that meet. Sanford, a pole vaulter, heard plenty of rumors about what prompted his coach’s exit, but the only thing he knew for certain was that his season was going to look a lot different than he thought.

“All the coaches were kind of scrambling,” Sanford says, “trying to figure out what to do to help the athletes for that meet, and then what to do with us the rest of the season.”

Instead of being coached by Horn, a national champion in the heptathlon in 2014, Sanford took guidance from the school’s sprint coach, who essentially told him and the rest of the vaulters to help each other. About halfway through the season, they finally brought in a high school pole vault coach — a nice guy, Sanford said, but no Horn. “It’s different than having an experienced person.” 

Sanford struggled that season, failing to clear 15 feet — a height that he had cleared four times the previous season. It wasn’t just him, either; about half of his pole vault teammates failed to set personal bests that outdoor season.

“For the most part, every single one of us struggled,” Sanford says.

For Sanford, those struggles were ill-timed. The spring of 2024 was supposed to be his coming-out party; he had transferred the previous fall from Division II Montevallo University, and he was now on the biggest stage in the sport.

There’s perks to being an SEC athlete, Sanford says. The facilities, the food, the tutoring. Plus, there’s something unmeasurable. “I think being an SEC athlete just has a different look to you whenever you’re wearing that uniform,” Sanford says.

He knew he was going to be near the bottom end of SEC pole vaulting, but he didn’t mind. Competing in a Power 5 conference was the biggest, brightest opportunity of his life, and it came with the promise of development.

Or so he thought.

To be sure, Sanford says he has improved a lot during his time at Mississippi State, but after the 2024 outdoor season, he was still at the bottom end of the SEC in terms of his results — perhaps even lower than he was when he arrived. Still, it wasn’t the end of the world; again, he would have plenty of time to develop.

Wrong again. When the first news of the House vs. NCAA settlement came in October, Sanford’s world became a lot more uncertain. Even his coach didn’t know what was going to happen.

“He was like, ‘Look, I'm gonna be honest with you,’” Sanford says. “‘We haven’t really heard anything except what’s on the news. They’ve really told us nothing. And so we’re not really sure if it’s gonna affect us or not.’”

Knowing his position and fearing the worst, Sanford decided to take the uncertainty out of the situation. After redshirting this winter and spring for Mississippi State, he’ll be transferring to Western Colorado University, reuniting with his coach from Montevallo. 

At this point, Sanford’s story is decidedly more upbeat than McGinley’s or Rimmel’s. For someone who is seemingly having the biggest opportunity of his life being taken from him — through little fault of his own — Sanford possesses striking optimism. Despite the unfairness of the situation, there are a few silver linings.

For one, he’s lived his entire life in the Southeast, and now he has a chance to explore new territory. That may seem like a trivial perk, but the implications stretch far beyond the literal ones. Western Colorado is a land of opportunity for Sanford; he’s once again going to have a multi-events coach, allowing him to develop in the pole vault and his other disciplines.

“I think I’ll have a breakout season in my senior year,” Sanford says.

However, the most important silver lining has nothing to do with Western Colorado, and everything to do with Mississippi State. In his words, he will still “carry the badge” of being an SEC athlete, which has been a major boost when it comes to the three words that have defined the last five years in college athletics: Name, Image and Likeness.

Sanford took advantage of his NIL opportunities at Mississippi State, to say the least. In addition to receiving a $6,000 stipend from the school per academic year, he worked with several companies, including Adidas and Firefly Recovery. He won’t get the stipend at Western Colorado, but he’ll be able to continue some of his existing partnerships and forge some new ones. In fact, since transferring, he’s already partnered with Swift Optics, a company based in Colorado that makes binoculars and other scopes.

Somehow, in this scenario, Braxton Sanford is the lucky one. He may be edged out, but he at least had an “in” to begin with. As he talks about his concerns for the sport, most of them deal with other people.

His main concern, like that of most people in the track and field sphere, is about a lack of focus around development.

“A lot of coaches are going to have to go after very established guys,” Sanford says. “They’re not going to be able to take freshmen that aren’t super good right away.”

Replicating his own experience, for example, would be difficult today. He says there’s no way he would be able to go to Mississippi State if he was coming out of high school in 2025 — “they probably won’t take anyone under 16 feet now,” he says. He would never have the chance to live the life of an SEC athlete, or to have the same success in the NIL market.

When Braxton Sanford saw the bright lights in Starkville, Mississippi, he was welcomed. There was room for a guy like him.

In 2025? Not so much.

 

BOULDER, COLORADO

“It’s just so much faster now.”

Every January, some of the top minds in high school distance running gather for an annual conference in Boulder, Colorado. Hosted by noted coach and author Jay Johnson, the Boulder Running Clinic has a reputation for drawing prep coaches from around the country for a two-day exchange of training strategies, coaching philosophies and emerging best practices.

But like many clinics, it’s the side conversations and mealtime chatter that offer a kind of informal referendum on the state of the sport.

This year, the impact of roster limitations was certainly on the agenda.

“It came up right away at the first dinner,” says Eric Dettman, a 2025 keynote speaker. “How coaches are navigating it, trying to help kids figure out all these different options.”

Dettman, who presented alongside fellow Lincoln High (Oregon) coach Marie Davis Markham, listened to the swirl of conversation with a mix of familiarity and foreboding.

“I think it was just a general sense of concern,” he says. “For longevity for kids, the direction that track and field and cross country is going  at the NCAA level, and what that might look like in 5 or 10 years. We’re all seeing the same thing.”

For more than a decade, Dettman has developed a culture of success at the southwest Portland high school. His Lincoln girls team, led by individual standout Ellery Lincoln, is the defending Oregon 6A state cross country champs. He’s had runners compete at Foot Locker Nationals, win individual state titles, and he’s qualified a team or an individual for every Nike Cross National meet since 2019.

But there’s another statistic that Dettman finds equally fulfilling. 

“Since 2019, we've had 31 kids commit to running at different schools,” Dettman says. “And that's everything from D1 to JUCO to NAIA, and all of the above. We want our kids to develop this passion for running, and want to keep doing it. It's fun to help them walk through that process.”

As he and his fellow coaches have guided this year’s seniors, he’s seen a marked difference in what’s expected, in terms of performance from high school recruits, and what’s possible, in terms of available spots on Division I teams.

“It seems like standards have increased greatly in the sense of what a D1 school is looking for,” he says. “And that's been the toughest piece — it's just so much faster now.”

Runners who might have secured multiple D1 offers, even a year or two ago, are finding few opportunities now. Much of that, Dettman knows, can be attributed to an intersection of factors: the transfer portal, the increase in international recruiting, and preemptive roster size reductions.

He recalls a recent conversation with a coach at a top Division I school, about a senior he’s currently shepherding through the recruiting process. 

“This coach basically said, ‘Why would I take a good — maybe really good, but not elite — girl when I could just find somebody in the portal that, after the first two years of college, can [already] run well in the college system?’ And I think that's making things way more challenging.”

He worries, too, for the future of walk-on or developmental talent at the college level. Many of the runners he’s coached at Lincoln, if they have D1 aspirations, have fit into that category.

“I think that probably goes away,” he says, “especially with these roster limitations. An SEC type school that has 10 spots, they're not going to have a kid walk on.”

That doesn’t mean Dettman believes there isn’t a place in college running for recruits who might be squeezed out of Division I roster spots, just that the high schoolers he coaches will need to be more creative and flexible. Open to other possibilities.

Which is all part of the development process, in Dettman’s mind.

“I want all of our kids to believe, ‘I can do this at the next level if I want to,’” he says. “And then make sure they know that all of these options are great, and they're different for everybody.”

 

ROMEO, MICHIGAN

“Everyone wants to get their own, and usually, when things like that happen, it crumbles.”

Mike Buslepp is another coach who knows a thing or two about development.

In 2018, his Romeo High School girls’ team finished 14th at the Michigan cross country state meet. In 2019, they were eighth. Then sixth. Then sixth again. Then second. In 2023, they finally ascended to the top, and they stayed there the next year.

He didn’t create a dynasty by “feeding the cats” all the time. That’s what he used to do; a decade ago, if you were a top girl on his team, you’d be running 50 miles a week, no matter what. The Bulldogs didn’t really start to grow, though, until Buslepp started to emphasize two things: individualization, and more importantly, patience.

“That’s part of what the sport is,” Buslepp says. “It requires a lot of discipline, but it also requires a lot of patience.”

Nowadays, Buslepp trains his athletes according to their own needs, and like Dettman, he prioritizes long-term growth. He wants his athletes to be at their best when they’re seniors, as well as when they’ve left his program. After all, high school track is far from the endgame.

All of this is to say that Buslepp appreciates the long game. Which, of course, means that he finds it hard to imagine his athletes stepping into a world where development is de-emphasized.

For now, the anticipation of roster limits hasn’t hit his program too hard. One athlete, whom he doesn’t name, had previously been looking at some high-level Division 1 programs, but is now struggling to retain those opportunities. Other than that, though, most of his athletes were already far into the recruiting process by the time the announcements came around.

However, he believes it could become a much bigger problem down the line. Many of his past athletes, he says, didn’t have the best marks coming out of high school, but they became valuable members of their collegiate teams because they bought into a long-term growth process. If those athletes were around today, he says, they likely wouldn’t have the same opportunities.

“You’re gonna have a lot more situations,” Buslepp says, “where those kids aren’t even gonna be able to be found.”

It’s a concern that Lincoln’s Dettman has too, especially for some of his late-developers.

One key, Dettman says, is to help high school athletes adjust their expectations, reframing what qualifies as “success” in terms of the recruitment experience. 

“I think it's altering this idea of D1 or bust,” he says. “Helping kids — like really challenging them — to believe that it's not just a D1 program that breeds success. You can find equal and potentially better success, or a better fit, at a lower level. That's what a lot of our conversations are looking like right now.”

Despite the doom-and-gloom that might animate some of these discussions, especially in the beginning, it’s possible to find some optimism.

Going to a Division 2 school, Buslepp agrees, is far from the end of the world. 

“When you assess a college program,” Buslepp says, “in general, it’s about how you fit in with that team, and that culture, and that coach. That can be done anywhere.”

He says a lot of people look at Division 1 as “the bright, shiny lights,” but they’re not always necessary. For example, a program like Grand Valley State, which has won eight NCAA championships in cross country and track and field at the Division 2 level over the past decade, could develop an athlete just as much, if not more, than a Power 5 school.

It’s difficult to say how meaningful of a silver lining that is, though. There are several other factors to consider when it comes to assessing a situation like this one. Buslepp is particularly concerned about how much of an emphasis money is receiving in college sports nowadays.

“It’s turning into the Wild West,” Buslepp says. “Everyone wants to get their own, and usually, when things like that happen, it crumbles.”

Nothing has crumbled yet. Nothing may crumble at all, in fact; we are still weeks away from Judge Wilken’s final ruling. If the House settlement is approved, though, things could get messy. Buslepp can see the writing on the wall.

“I just know whenever opportunities are taken away in this sport,” Buslepp says, “it’s usually never a good thing.”

Next: Part 2 of this two-part report comes out on March 26 on DyeStat. It details how the House settlement could affect mid-major universities, as well as the impact on a group that stands to lose as much as anyone: high school athletes.